A mirror held up to our consciences

Every month, youtuber Ralph Müller delivers his scathing analysis of a typical contemporary phenomenon. This month, he explores the banality of evil through Nuremberg.

The film Nuremberg by James Vanderbilt (2025) recounts the notorious trial of the Nazi regime through the eyes of Douglas Kelly, the American psychiatrist charged with assessing the mental health of the accused and ensuring that they did not take their own lives.

At the end of the film, the protagonist appears on a radio program to discuss the book that inspired his experience. Deeply affected, he defends his thesis with the prophetic energy of a witness anxious to prevent future tragedies. In the course of his adventure, he came into contact with several high-ranking Nazi dignitaries, foremost among them Hermann Göring, Hitler's number two and, at the time of the trial, number one in what was then the party.

In the course of his interviews, Kelly increasingly felt that he was not dealing with «special» men, men who might have, albeit in evil, a disposition or skills that could explain the unheard-of nature of their actions. It appeared to him that these individuals were for the most part mediocre and incredibly normal. These men had been mere cogs in a machine. And therein undoubtedly lies the lesson of history, as Hannah Arendt famously showed: evil becomes banal when responsibility dissolves in the meanders of a system, when the individual dissolves himself in the inhumanity of a mechanism whose dimensions are such that it doesn't seem to concern him. Add the glamour of ideology to the mix, and consciousness is permanently reduced.

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This idea is inconceivable to the journalists we see interviewing Kelly at the end of the film. During the radio discussion, the psychiatrist goes so far as to declare that his fellow citizens would be foolish and naive to believe that the next time Nazi-like horrors occurred, they would be warned by the look of the costumes. Where the director has shown himself to be particularly subtle is in the final dialogue of his work. One of the journalists accompanies the psychiatrist out of the studio and says: 

«A word of advice: spitting on your country is probably not the best way to sell your book.» 

The doctor, resigned to being misunderstood, leaves without adding anything.

This last line of dialogue is powerful because it re-enacts, on a completely different level, the logic underlying totalitarian madness. Indeed, while one worries above all about the future of man, the other seems to care first and foremost about the image of his country. If the doctor's thesis doesn't satisfy him, it's because it says one essential thing that changes everything: the Nazis weren't Nazis because they were these individuals in particular - which would place them at a comforting distance from we. It was human nature that was at stake, in its capacity to do evil, and it follows that the responsibility for humanity lies with all men. It would be a mistake to reassure ourselves by believing that this historical cruelty was peculiar to a group whose monstrousness placed it outside the spectrum of humanity.

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This lesson can be extended more broadly to the belief that the enemy has a monopoly on vice.

The film concludes with this quote from Robin G. Collingwood: «You can tell what man is capable of by what he has already done.»

The trainer Ralph Müller delivers his scathing analysis of a social phenomenon in each issue. Watch his videos on the YouTube channel «La Cartouche».

You have just read a column published in our print edition (Le Regard Libre N°124).